Bits are cheap, atoms are expensive: critiquing the turn towards tangibility in HCI

Holmquist, LE ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0229-2345, 2023. Bits are cheap, atoms are expensive: critiquing the turn towards tangibility in HCI. In: Schmidt, A, Väänänen, K, Goyal, T, Kristensson, PO and Peters, A, eds., CHI EA '23: extended abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY: ACM. ISBN 9781450394222

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Abstract

Ever since the introduction of the desktop interface, HCI has strived to develop alternatives that make interacting with computers more physical, embodied and ubiquitous. In particular, the vision of tangible user interfaces (TUI) has had a large impact and inspired an extensive body of research over the last 25 years. However, despite strong interest from the research community, commercial success has been limited. We argue that the reason is that whereas graphical user interfaces are inherently cheap, physical interfaces are expensive: to create; to control; to modify; to maintain; and to mass-produce and distribute. This also leads to TUIs being highly problematic from a sustainability viewpoint. Finally, as a way to combine the best of both worlds, we introduce a vision of liberated pixels, which are visual output elements that are perceivable, addressable, and persistent in the physical world.

Item Type:	Chapter in book
Description:	Paper presented at CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany, 23-28 April 2023.
Creators:	Holmquist, L.E.
Publisher:	ACM
Place of Publication:	New York, NY
Date:	19 April 2023
ISBN:	9781450394222
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1145/3544549.3582744 DOI 2328820 Other
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham School of Art & Design
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	08 Jan 2025 09:35
Last Modified:	08 Jan 2025 10:42
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52805

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